Flickr decided to change the image compression system for all thumbnails without any prior announcement to its users, which led to nagging from the most observative.
The whole affair started when some users have complained to Flickr for a reduction in the quality of the photos they have uploaded.
This has led the PetaPixel blog that deals with photography in general, to make an in-depth exploring the whole situation, which yielded some interesting results.
First of all, some basics data: when you upload a photo to Flickr, the service, except by storing the original photo on its servers, it also creates additional icons in various resolutions.
PetaPixel's technical approach was to take one of the former photos that they had uploaded to FIickr a few years ago and re-uploaded it today, with the current parameters of FIickr's service.
As a result, there was a lower quality for all icons, but the original photo was the same as the one they had previously uploaded.
The changes made to FIickr's algorithm seem to only affect thumbnails, sometimes reducing their size. archiveup to 50%, but this fact does not seem to bother too many of its users, as most of them have not yet noticed the change.
Original photos are stored individually and Ficker still offers 1TB free storage for all users.
Ficker's response to the PetaPixel survey was as follows:
FIickr does not compress the originals If you download your originals, the files you receive will be completely identical. Like most applications for photos, we have created various thumbnail sizes for quick presentation των εικόνων στο Internet and mobile phones. "